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December 10, 2024 - 11:45am
Next month, NHS England will start recruiting for a trial into the effects of puberty-blocking drugs for gender-distressed children. Some might say better late than never, given the many problems identified by the Cass Review earlier this year. Nonetheless, a group of clinicians and campaigners have written to Health Secretary Wes Streeting, expressing concern as to whether the trial should be going ahead at all, at least in its current form.
Among the issues raised by Genspect, Transgender Trend, the LGB Alliance and others are the decision to focus on puberty blockers with no announcement of “a complimentary study into psychological interventions”. Also highlighted is the continued absence of “a clear rationale” for their usage, as well as the difficulty of recruiting individuals who are sufficiently mature to consent to the treatment and also lack “unstable family relationships, poor psychological functioning or a history of trauma”.
Reading the letter, it becomes increasingly clear that “only a very small number of patients would be eligible to participate”. One could go further: these eligible patients surely cannot exist. In which case, how can such a trial ever be ethical?
Of course, children who are gender non-conforming and/or deeply distressed by their sexed bodies do exist and always have. And nor should Dr Hilary Cass have framed her review along the lines of “there is no such thing as the trans child”, an approach which would have given too much ammunition to those already primed to smear her as a bigot. Cass was in a difficult position, insofar as granting any legitimacy to “gender medicine” already raises the question of whether the “trans child” is a real phenomenon. Having been tasked with analysing the provision of care, as opposed to its conceptual underpinnings, her hands were tied.
Now, though, serious questions should be asked over where to go next. If the aim of any trial is to find the best way of helping children, we should be honest about not just the medical, but the social and cultural impact of puberty blockers as a remedy. The lie that one can “press pause” on puberty, or even go on to change sex, has fundamentally altered how young people experience gender dysphoria (the diagnostic term itself — so much more authoritative than mere “distress” or “unhappiness” — might be said to have done the same). It’s a lie which has already obstructed attempts to explore gender distress holistically, looking at both causes and genuine ways forward.
Gender identity adherents insist that “gender clinics” do not treat mental illness or delusion. Indeed, this has been an assumption on which the prescription of puberty blockers has relied. Yet to desperately want to be the opposite sex, to the extent of wanting to harm your own body, is to be mentally unwell. To think it is possible to put a life stage on hold is to fundamentally misunderstand how human development works. Those who have not yet gone through puberty lack the maturity to be in a position to decide against it.
A potential outcome of any trial could be to show that some children never voice regret, and the response to this might then be to claim that all one need do is ensure only “true” trans children receive blockers. Yet this would not be finding a cure so much as finding a way to excuse mistakes already made. For self-declared believers in social construction, gender medicine supporters show little understanding of how their own ideology has created the conditions in which lifelong physical suffering has become the best some children can hope for.
Any good-faith trial into how best to treat childhood gender distress needs to recognise that everyone must grow up and no one can change sex. Puberty blockers aren’t a treatment option, but instead a treatment obstruction. They have played a fundamental role in heightening gender distress and masking its causes. We cannot find the cure in the sickness itself.
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Subscribe“Having been tasked with analysing the provision of care, as opposed to its conceptual underpinnings, her hands were tied.”
No. Her hands were not tied. She is a physician. She was perfectly placed to explain what Gender Ideology is and what its vile consequences are.
She brushed it all under the carpet. And that is the same as condoning the Ideology, and in effect, protecting it.
Gender Ideology, again, is left alone, unexplained, uncriticised. Everyone is left in the dark floundering. The media are party to this.
Why are children being taught in schools to identify as non-binary?
It is a scandal that no one talks about this. It is a scandal that no one addresses this issue in Unherd.
Yes, the ‘nonbinary’ trend is sinister; ditto teaching children about adult sexuality from young ages (and getting drag queens to read to kids… did anyone ever ask ‘why would we want deliberate, provocative parodies of women reading stories to our children?’ before putting up the posters)… many of those who claim to be NB are uninteresting or vulnerable narcissists, and pronouns are a way of making themselves visible, but they are demanding that society go along with their lies. They are demanding that we sever our relationship with the truth so as to uphold something that cannot, by definition, exist.
“and getting drag queens to read to kids… did anyone ever ask ‘why would we want deliberate, provocative parodies of women reading stories to our children?”
Why yes, the question has been asked.
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-drag-queen-story-hour/
And, it has been answered by the Queer Theorists themselves in their own ‘scholarly’ work.
“It may be that DQSH is “family friendly,” in the sense that it is accessible and inviting to families with children, but it is less a sanitizing force than it is a preparatory introduction to alternate modes of kinship. Here, DQSH is “family friendly” in the sense of “family” as an old-school queer code to identify and connect with other queers on the street.”
Remember, this clearly isn’t grooming.
Tear this evil from society root and branch.
Your argument contained many valid points until the last sentence, which is self-evidently nonsense. What were you responding to, precisely, if this were true?
I am making the simple point if there is no discussion of Gender Ideology, there will be no understanding of the concepts used.
Do parents have any idea what their children are being taught and why?
No you’re not, you’re upbraiding Unherd for not discussing an issue which is erm… currently being discussed in this very article.
There are hundreds of articles going on about ‘gender’.
Not a single one explaining what it is.
I would defend the Cass review. It caused society to sit up and question trans ideology in a way many commentary articles could not have. It may not have expressed all the things you felt true. But there is some wisdom in leaving some things unsaid at first so as not to put people from the other side off from the start.
I do understand she was in a difficult position.
But she by the end of the review she will have talked to hundreds of people.
The outcome of the gender clinic experiments has been horrifying. Thousands of children have been desexed. Their bodies have been tampered with so that they don’t reach adulthood. That is a crime. And it was all done in the name of an Ideology.
So no. The Cass review, by refusing to acknowledge what happened and by not even mentioning the Ideology which drove it all, was a whitewash.
You think they should be ethical? What an extraordinary idea! Surely nowadays ideology always trumps ethics.
What has been enforced in society by so-called charities (Stonewall,’for example, which lost its sense of purpose after gay marriage was legalised and so jumped on the transtrain), the Pritzker family, Rothblatt, Soros via his vast web of foundations is perhaps the most pernicious thing I’ve witnessed in four decades of existence. Rather than look ar how postmodernism has removed a sense of meaning, how porn has changed the way that men and women, girls and boys interact and relate, people in positions of real lifechanging power have systematically mutilated children. The Texan doctor Greg Haim is experiencing lawfare by the US government because he whistleblew on the giving of puberty blockers to eleven year olds after the procedure was supposed to be banned. In the UK, we have seen so many cases where people have been hounded from their jobs, sent death and other threats, doxxed, lost jobs and career opportunities, seen friendships and social relationships dissolve because of the totally dystopian claim that individuals can change sex.
They can’t.
Every cell in the human body is sexed. If you have large gametes, you’re female; with small motile gametes, you’re male. Eroding what women fought for, putting rapists in women’s prisons, enforcing the tyranny of ‘be kind’ is bad enough; going after children is the most profoundly wicked thing grown adults can do. Locking them in the early Tanner stages, preventing brain development, causing osteoporosis and heart disease, amputating breasts, leaving boys with prepubescent genitalia, is hideous. Many of these children are gay, autistic, have a history of trauma and/or sexual abuse: who gave the directive for vulnerable children to be sterilised? To reinforce strict gender binaries like a parody of the 1950s by ‘transing the gay away’ and saying that effeminate boys and tomboyish girls are inherently wrong? The 70s and 80s were a riot of long hair and makeup, flamboyant clothes and radical self-expression: we’ve gone backwards.
I apologise for my lengthy rant: as a TERF, I’ve been shouting about this for years and have suffered significant losses re career potential, work &c. But it’s a battle that has to be fought and, even with the return of Trump and the right emerging across Europe, we have to be vigilant. Those who orchestrated this ‘cause’, based on the flimsiest appeals to emotion and absolute destruction of the truth, will not go away easily: they will reappear, with the ‘MAPs’ attached, and will redouble their efforts to enforce their Frankensteinian cision.
Very well said.
Who knew that being a woman who did not want men in women’s private spaces would one day be seen as a terrible thing by some people.
It’s a strange hill to have to die on, isnt it. Let’s not castrate little boys let’s not permanently deform the body of a young gurl. OK, the Ottoman Emoire did the first, noone ever did the second. To carry out a trial to see if it is a good thing makes me shudder. Child torture and mutilation? To be trialled?
Don’t forget female genital mutilation that has been around for a long time – deforming the body of a young girl in a horrible way. Interesting that it might even be understood as making the girl ‘less of a woman’.
A clinical trial may be the gold standard in evaluating the effectiveness of a treatment but the formal requirements of such a trial cannot always be met and this is one such case.
Outside certain very formally set up trials such as double blind drug trials or agricultural trials complete objectivity is just impossible.
We only have observational data and arguing over what it means, sorry technocrats that is all there is.
It is noticeable in the transgender case that the proponents of this treatment refused to collect the observational data (as noted by the judges in the Keira Bell trial). This hiding (or refusal to collect) of the data indicates that they do not want to take part in any debate and this is unacceptable behaviour. Draw you own conclusions from that.
There is no such thing as a trans child
Gotta love the lack of self-awareness of the “leave T kids alone” signs. Leaving them alone would mean NOT using puberty blockers, NOT pushing adolescents into life-alternating irreversible surgeries, while also leaving the other kids alone.
I hope that the adults involved in such an experiment will consider the likelihood that at some point the wind will change and they will find themselves facing retribution from the children they have sterilised, if not from the law itself.
Why are Unherd (stupid name) removing comments.
The gender clinics ‘treating’ children are a scandal. This is my opinion.
Cass, by the end of the review, would have talked to hundreds of people.
The outcome of the gender clinic experiments has been horrifying. Thousands of children have been desexed. Their bodies have been tampered with so that they don’t reach adulthood. That is a crime. And it was all done in the name of an Ideology.
So no. The Cass review, by refusing to acknowledge what happened and by not even mentioning the Ideology which drove it all, was a whitewash.
This bizarre article makes the claim Cass was right not to question the concepts of Gender Ideology on the grounds that people would smear her as a bigot. That’s it? A two year long report can’t question Gender Ideology because someone will call out “bigot”. It’s surreal.
This is a disgraceful defence of a whitewashing report.
Another article in Unherd (what a ridiculous name) prohibiting criticism of Gender Ideology.
Here’s an article about the fluidity of sexual orientation: https://theconversation.com/sexual-identity-is-more-fluid-than-previously-thought-says-twelve-year-study-243892?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=The%20Weekend%20Conversation%20-%203191132551&utm_content=The%20Weekend%20Conversation%20-%203191132551+CID_a733248efb4d9327a63fd20dd9b6d21e&utm_source=campaign_monitor_uk&utm_term=Sexual%20identity%20is%20more%20fluid%20than%20previously%20thought%20says%20twelve-year%20study.
I realise that sexual orientation and ‘gender identity’ are not the same thing but they are in the same ball park. If one is fluid, surely the other is most likely to be so as well and surgical or other radical interventons in children cannot possibly be ethically right.
Good piece.